This week is all about preparing the upcoming Halves presentation.
We spent a couple of days refining or slides and rehearse a lot a lot! Through practicing, we have a more solid idea of what our goals are and what questions we are solving. It is a great chance for us to revisit our vision.
We also talked a bit about our playtest, since we are still at early prototyping stage, the playtest we did did not show a lot in terms of the feeling of RL in the game for the players. We have consulted different people including Pittsburgh faculty and we are mapping out a better plan for playtesting in the future.
Besides rehearsal, we also finished implementing the second layer of complexity for the hippo design. Some observations we have seen are that now the system is definitely more complex than the first layer demo. Giving different rewards and punishments for the RL agent to decide but the results may be unpredictable. For example, the fish haters agent supposes to eat ice cream and watermelon, however, sometimes, they still eat the fish. It’s something interesting to see is this unpredictable element make the system more natural and believable and lead to a delightful experience for players.
At the same time, We are also preparing the design documentation as our client requested. The documents contain the goal, theming, mechanics, technology and lessons.
Now we are prepared, here we go Halves!
